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The Jewish Evil Eye isn’t like the Sicilian Evil Eye, which is a sort of optically-delivered precision-guided curse. In Jewish tradition, the Evil Eye is a sort of personification of the idea that the universe is out to get you. The universe isn’t just harsh, it’s perverse, which means it’s wrong in the sense that things go wrong. The general summary of this belief is that, as the American science fiction author Larry Niven put it, “The perversity of the universe tends towards a maximum”. Things don’t just go wrong for a good reason. Things don’t just go wrong for no reason. Things actually go wrong because it’s a law of nature that things go wrong. Niven wrote this in conscious parody of Newton’s Second Law of Thermodynamics: that the entropy of the universe tends towards a maximum. Niven, tongue in cheek, tells us that things don’t just get more and more messy and confused until in the end everything is as messy and confused as can be (which is what Newton is, in essence, saying), but that things go wrong and get wronger; and why? Things
go wrong because, like Newton’s version, it’s a law of nature
for things to go wrong. Perversity – wrongness – is wired into the workings of the universe. Edgar Allan Poe adopted a different language to say the same thing: satire. Poe’s 1845 article “The Imp of the Perverse” is a comic parody of contemporary writing style (though somebody is actually killed by a poisoned candle). In this tale, perversity is the demon that makes us stand at the edge of a cliff bathing in the adrenaline rush that comes with the knowledge that we are perched on the edge of doom. (Note: I’m paraphrasing here). The murderer in Poe’s story is perfectly safe until he utters the words “I am safe”, at which point, he is hustled along his path to the gallows. See, the murderer’s problem is that he “tempted fate.” The Three Fates were happily spinning the thread of his life as he poisoned his victim, inherited the money, blah blah blah. Clotho spun the thread, Lachesis measured it but then Atropos heard him gloating and reaches out with the scissors. Snip! Had he only kept his foolish yap shut, those nasty old ladies would have let him live out his natural span. So we have the science-joke version, the Gothic horror version and the classical mythology version. I grew up with the Yiddish version. If anything good ever happens to you, don’t cheer. Don’t gloat. Don’t draw attention to it. Keep your mouth shut. Don’t put on the ring when you’re in Mordor. The Eye is bound to see it. The Evil Eye is harsher than the three Fates. The fates spin the thread of people’s lives while singing in harmony with the song of the Sirens. The Evil Eye doesn’t mess around with singing--it’s looking for happy people just to make them sad. The
Evil Eye can’t be omniscient. That would make it into a sort of
anti-God, and that’s just a bit too Buffy for even the most bitter
of persecuted races. As we look at the world around us, we see that some
people prosper without the Evil Eye noticing. The universe’s perversity
has got to benefit somebody, sometimes; and that means that the Evil Eye
has to have a focus. The Evil Eye focuses on crushing some against the
wall while, like a bubble under wallpaper, other people pop up happily. In order to make sure that the Evil Eye focuses elsewhere, you have to use clever misdirection. The simplest way to use clever misdirection is to pick up the child and proclaim its ugliness. The Yiddish word for beautiful child is “Zeeskeit” (which means “sweetness”). At times like this you pick up the child and cry, “Meeskeit”, which if you know the musical Cabaret means “ugly child.” The child’s mother, if she’s culturally aware enough to understand Yiddish, will know exactly what you’re trying to do. The Eye, which is evil but (apparently) also stupid, will be fooled. On a grander scale, parents whose lives are especially miserable might know that the Evil Eye is focussed on them. And if they have a child, the Eye won’t be fooled by cheap tricks into focussing elsewhere. So when they have a beautiful baby boy they might name him “Alter”, which means “old man.” That way, whenever they call their child home for supper they’ll be shouting, “Old man! Old man!” The Evil Eye, which exults in wrongness gets nothing out of making an old man die, so the child’s life is thereby saved. (Contrary to what you make be now thinking, I’m not making this up). There are also little things that you can do once you’ve already made the mistake of saying something nice. You can spit three times, for instance. (The vast supernatural power of perversity apparently abhors gob). Spitting this way can also work when you want to drive people away. Or you can say, “No Evil Eye” in Yiddish, which might … just might … drive off the Eye. It’s sort of like driving past a speed camera at ten miles over the limit but then slowing down for five miles just in case you can alter the rotation of the earth, turn back time and change history by going that little bit slower. When I was born, my Aunt Libby put a scarlet ribbon over my cot. My mother thought this was to ward off the Evil Eye (Why not? Everything seems to be oriented towards warding off the Evil Eye. You can’t be too careful. Lives are at stake.) It turned out that the red ribbon was to ward of Lilith, Queen of the Demons. I used to think Lilith, Queen of the Demons was cool until I found out that (according to the 17th Century Kabbalistic poet N.H. Bacharach) she causes Sudden Infant Death Syndrome. When you hear your child giggling in the night, wrote Bacharach, Lilith is playing with the baby. Just reading that in a book on Jewish mythology made me want to simultaneously cry, hide under my bed and run upstairs to check on my daughter. I took no comfort at all in the idea that I could banish Lilith by tapping my girl’s nose three times and reciting an incantation. Bacharach’s version of Lilith is, however, a very different sort of idea from the general perversity of the universe. It’s an explanation of the unknown – a classic feature of religion to an anthropologist – and an expression of the helplessness felt by parents who fear the unexplained death by night. It’s hedged around by all sorts of excuses for a merciful God’s complicity in the death of infants (according to Bacharach, when you have naked sex with a man, have sex during your period or have sex with the lights on, God punishes you by making your children vulnerable to Lilith. Now that’s religion at its crudest). The Evil Eye is an altogether different sort of thing--almost the opposite of the Queen of the Demons. It’s a rejection of the idea that the evil in the world is caused by demons, except perhaps Poe’s satirical “Imp of the Perverse.” It is a rejection of the idea that the misfortunes of our lives are punishment for our sins. It is an affirmation of the idea that the universe is a cold, impersonal place where things go wrong all the time. In the immortal words of the bumper sticker poet, “shit happens.” It is a blackly humorous coping mechanism. According to the 16th Century scholar Rabbi Judah Loew of Prague, the Evil Eye also enforces an odd sort of social etiquette. Loew, better known as the creator of the prototypical Frankenstein’s monster, The Golem of Prague, bases this idea on the verse “Don’t eat the bread of a jealous person (literally, ‘a person with an evil eye’) nor be jealous of his delicacies.” Proverbs 23:6. To the parent of a beautiful baby, the natural instinct is to tell everyone she knows how beautiful her baby is. The listener might, especially in times or places when infant mortality was high, be bereaved. The listener might, in a world of distorted families, be separated from her own children by distance, time or law. The Evil Eye is regret, jealousy and spite. The rituals for banishing the Evil Eye are designed to constantly remind the fortunate not to gloat. For you, right now, the universe is a happy place where the worst thing you have to fear is entropy. The person standing beside you may exist in a perverse universe, where everything that can go wrong will go wrong. Don’t make her jealous of the way your life’s working. It’s just not good. So is this superstition? Is it social control or an explanation of the unknown, like the Lilith myth? To me, this yet another cultural way of creating the lubricant necessary for us rough humans to rub up against each other without causing too much friction. In this case, it includes an underlying dark sense of humour. Now, that’s the rub. Dr Lynette Davidson lectures and writes on history. She lives in a charming market town in the south of England with her partner and two daughters. |
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